How to pull bulk text out of file and paste it into another file?

Ok so i have a few files which contains emails and passwords. I want to make a single file of only the passwords, of all the files, without altering the originals. Each line is structured as so:

:password

(there is no space between either the email or the password from the colon)

I was trying to figure out how to grep the file and pipeline the text into a new file but im not so sure on how to write the command. Please help thankyou.

2 Answers

You can use cut:

cut -d: -f2- file1 file2 > output

• -d: tells cut that the fields are separated with :, and
• -f2- tells cut to output all fields from the second onwards.

Assuming no colon characters in the email addresses, For a bunch of files, let's call them files*.txt:

cat files*.txt | sed -e 's/[^:]*://' > all-passwords.txt

Should do it.

• cat files*.txt - prints all lines to STDOUT
• sed -e 's/[^:]*://' - replace everything up to the first ':' on the line with "nothing"
• > all-passwords.txt - create/overwrite a file called all-passwords.txt
• >> all-passwords.txt - If you were to use >>, it will only create or append to the file, not overwrite it.

Notes:

• If you have ':' characters in only the passwords, this will still work.